One Room Challenge Fall 2017 - WK 1

Well looky loo who’s back?!  As I live and breathe, I simply cannot, for the life of me, believe that I am voluntarily jumping back on the ORC link bandwagon.  Committing to the One Room Challenge™ is knowing that for the next six weeks, I am basically subjecting myself to something akin to self-flagellation.

I have participated in three - one of which I was one of the 20 featured designers - and have sort of lived to tell the tale each time.  And while my marriage was truly tested – the mister and I do our own work – my tiny postage stamp of a house is better for each one.  The One Room Challenge™ is just that, a challenge.  It is not a contest ( ahem, Mom ) but rather a challenge to design and finish a room within six weeks.  All organized by superstar Linda of Calling It Home, who, over the course of 12 seasons, has been personally responsible for inspiring over 1,700 transformations and garnering major media attention along with generous sponsors!

So I am officially dusting off my design duster and reviving the blog to address a loooong overdue makeover.  So overdue, in fact, since I promised it right after finishing my first ORC in 2013.

For the first ORC as a guest participant I made over my bedroom into a moody layered retreat.  4 years later and I have not changed a thing.  One of my most shared projects to date that ultimately found its way onto House Beautiful’s website.  Totally pinch me moment.

For my second ORC, I was invited to be one of the featured 20 designers which was totally mind blowing given all the talent.  I felt a lot like Molly Ringwald sewing my own damn prom dress with no date.  That go round it was a soft reno of the kitchen.

The last ORC I did a few years ago again as a guest was my Auntie Mame inspired bathroom.  It is by far my absolute favorite as it is completely and totally me.  All the saturated and layered gestures in one fell swoop.

As with every ORC, we do all the work ourselves so things take For Like Ever.  And it always seems to come down to the nail-biting wire with paint going up the night before.  Budget is always tight but that’s how my mister makes me roll.  Hello, I’m Greek, and my last two nickels would burn a hole in my pocket.

Without further ado, on to this ORC…

A high spirited 9 year old with a penchant for bold strokes, pattern, purple and glitter.  Can get down with the first two, but, um, no glitter.  Like ever.  And the dreaded purple.  Hate purple. Like really, really hate purple like I hate root canals and fake friends flowers.

Everything with this little gal is more.  She is expressive, creative, and passionately curious.  Enthusiastic gestures and the tenacious pursuit of the next shiny thing are her milieu.  Read: dramatic, stubborn, demanding, unfocused ball of never-ending energy. 

Life with this dervish, while never dull, can be challenging at the best of times but especially when executive functioning is called for.  Finding errant shoes and the dog-eared homework in time to make the bus is never a simple task as one is likely jammed in the back of the super cool Zaha Hadid-esque fort, erected the night before from a tower of dirty clothes and duct tape; and the other, well, likely smeared with peanut butter and not completed because of said fort construction.  Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout by way of Little Peggy Ann McKay comes to mind.

We need a bedroom to match that bold-size personality.  But it must be both beautiful and functional.  One that fosters creative expression while also functioning to organize all the bits and bobs of a girl on the cusp of becoming a tweeny screenager.  Lord, give me strength.  Much like her tenacity, the room must have staying power.  But heaven help me, she demanded purple.  All the purple.  In spite of funky arm pits ( at nine?!!! ) and eye rolls on repeat, she still adores purple and glitter.  Hard pass.  Instead, she will get all the PINK IS THE NEW PURPLE propaganda I can muster.

Who am I even becoming?  Form and function is laughable coming from the Queen of All Show and No Go.  It is totally normal to wear 4” heels and lipstick to the delivery room, right?  I was once 5 hours late to a date ( likely our 3rd date ) with my future husband because I got distracted by a good book while searching for that perfect shade of red nail polish.  The dervish totally gets it from her father.

But for my own sanity, while painting a colorful canvas, we must assign a place for all things in Dervish’s room so we can make it to the bus on time once in 2017.

The BEFORE state is a rather disjointed jumble of mismatched castoffs.  The only two intentional items in the room are carryovers from her nursery when we moved her into the bigger room - the glider - which has seen better days and - the painting over her bed - which was commissioned from Jenny Andrews Anderson.  The painting is the ONLY thing likely staying.  If you are eagle eyed, you will notice many of her pieces feature prominently in my rooms.  I love me some JAA.  All the rest were thrown in from various rooms in a weak attempt at a big girl room.  Now it is time to give her space proper intention.

Soap operas aside, my little gal has a flair for the dramatic and is a collector at heart.  She is an old soul that reacts viscerally to color, smells, and music.  Coupled with a strong sense of self, her determination to walk to the beat of her own style drum is something I want to cultivate.  The following gals show a similar sense of individualism in their personal and professional lives and so serve as inspiration for our direction.

As of this late writing, I have yet to inform the mister that I am committing us for another challenge.  Be sure to check back in next week to see if I still have an intact marriage.  Or if you are flaky like me and can’t remember tomorrow’s meeting let alone a date next week, check me out on Instagram.  I will endeavor to overshare and overstory in a weak attempt to be relevant.

Forgive me if I’ve forgotten something important or to link someone because it’s been 100 years since I last blogged.  Be sure to catch up on the 20 featured designers.  Also, check out everyone else.  They are super swell too.

all design, layout, styling and photography by Emily Vanderputten except the following noted inspiration photos 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

One Room Challenge - Week 5 - in which the heroine addresses a crisis of confidence

Creating a good work of art takes time.

It demands patience.

It can't be rushed.

There will be days, months, years even, when you look at your canvas and think all the time you've spent on it has been for nothing.

But that's just exactly when you have to keep on going.

Because the day will arrive when you realize that all those insignificant little dots were adding up to something extraordinary.

                                                                                                                                                    Lisa Borgnes Giramonti

While I certainly do not count myself as an artist per se, I do consider any room that I design a canvas of sorts.  For that matter, I consider life to be a canvas of sorts, but that is a dissertation for another day. As with many artists, I fall victim to self-doubt throughout the ebb and flow of my creative process.  This round of The One Room Challenge™ is no exception.   Here in week 5 I have to remind myself to just keep on going because it feels as though no significant progress has been made even though I have been working all week in this 5 x 11 box of a room.

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If you have no earthly idea what I am talking about then get out from under your rock and read about it here.  If you are visiting for the first time, what took you so damn long?  I am re-doing my bathroom in 6 weeks as part of The One Room Challenge™ linking event. For a recap of weeks 1 – 4 click on the links below:

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

Whenever I find myself with a crisis of confidence or in a creative stale mate, I seek inspiration from kindred spirit animals.  Lisa Borgnes Giramonti is one such animal.  Although we have never spoken or even ever exchanged so much as an email, I am wildly inspired by her. I feel her, deeply.  I react viscerally to her writing, her love of literature, and her profound appreciation for detail in the art of living.  The art of living is something about which I feel quite passionate.  While I concede that we are not solving humanity's problems with good design or the One Room Challenge, specifically, the importance of art in life, which as it turns out, is nothing more than committing to something and following through wholeheartedly with your best work or intention, is as vitally important as breathing.

Committing to a challenge to re-do a room from start to finish in 6 weeks may seem easy.  It may even seem frivolous.  Let me assure you, that it is not.  When you add to that - public accountability in the social media arena, it is a downright terrifyingly defining call-to-action. Even when armed with a team of professionals ready to do your bidding, delays happen.  And I don’t have a team of professionals on hand… The deadline is precisely what makes participating in this so exciting and nerve-wracking and marriage-wrecking all wrapped into one. Even though art cannot be rushed, deadlines keep us accountable. As Ira Glass advocates, all of us who do creative work get into it because we have decent taste, or at least we think we do, and we realize that we must do a lot of work, even if it isn't that great, in order to create something extraordinarily special.  We must set deadlines for ourselves to turn out the work. Each and every time I agree to do the ORC, I know I am chasing that elusive 'special greatness' or in the parlance of connoisseurs, my master piece.  But, as Ira points out, most quit too soon. Most give up in the mediocre stages of creation, and this is what I must remind myself in the midst of each round - especially in week 5 with disparate patches of dry wall dots.  I know I am not great.  I know that my reach does not always match my vision.  But one thing I have learned from being a perfectionist, is that it is far better to try and fail with your whole heart, then to have never failed at all because you didn't try, or worse, because you only tried half-heartedly.

This ORC thing is mind boggling to my mister.  It is down right confounding to my non-design amigos.  It seems easy to my fellow arm-chair decorating enthusiasts who peruse Pinterest and tear inspiration sheets from shelter mags.  I know this first hand because I was one during the first handful of rounds. It is an entirely different thing altogether to design a room and take it from concept through to full installation – let alone do it in 6 weeks, in the public arena, on any kind of reasonable budget.  

My friend Linda from Calling it Home started this brilliant ORC a few years ago and it has since become a major phenomenon, rightfully so, trademarked, with mega watt participants, mondo reno budgets, sponsors, and editorial worthy results.  But at its core the ORC has always been about motivating and inspiring creative people to do more of their own work.  As a result, legions of creatives have rallied to the call and have done an extraordinary thing.  They have created. And continue to create their own work and put it out there, which in turn, inspires others to create.  While I stress about whether or not I will finish, or while I experience crazy pangs of anxiety about falling short, or whether or not my vision will live up to expectation, I remind myself of both the smallness and bigness of the task at hand. I am creating for creation sake, with my whole heart, so that one day, after many, many creations, I can realize that special thing.  But it is also just a damn room.

What does all this rambling esoteric mumbo jumbo mean?  It means that I need to simply get on with it, and leave the doubt behind. I will do what I set out do.  Create a room.  It may be great or it may not. I hope it happens within the allotted amount of time. At the outset in Week 1, I said this would be a simple refresh project.  Slap some paint on the walls, switch out some hardware, and fancy up a shower curtain.  Best laid plans of mice and men…

But like with many projects, scope creep has happened.  Things have evolved from the original plan... 

to this..

Instead of a simple vanity light swap, I got blinded by the light of gold petal sconces and a vintage glamazon 70s brass chrome paramour that I have been quietly stalking for no less than 2 years.  No exaggeration. 

Last week I left off hoping that we could run the electricity without incident over the weekend and I am happy to report that our marriage survived the task at hand.  The kharmic explosion of the combo fan/light, while in my best interests for a new-to-me brass light, left a huge gaping square hole in the ceiling.  We got the electrical sorted out and in the practical interest of ease, we elected to wait to put the fixtures up until after painting, given the size and shape of the fixtures. Fingers crossed our electrical wizardry is correct.

Moving electricity from an overhead vanity to sconces and replacing a torched overhead fan/light combo has resulted in the neverending  patch work story. Which leads to lots of waiting for said patches to dry.  And lots of sanding.  And lots of cleaning.  And more patching and more waiting.  And more sanding.  Rinse and repeat.  While I was up on my ladder patching holes, I came face to face with the slap shod drywall work I did 8 years ago.  It was lumpy bumpy at best.  I rushed the paint job 8 years ago and I am rectifying those mistakes this go round.  That of course means more sanding and patching.  But I have made progress, or at least more of a mess.  Case in point:

in which I thought I was done with a few simple patches

in which I realized that the walls looked like the back of my thighs

oh look, a tiny hole patch...

oh wait, many more patchy patches.  at least I have sconce wiring, right?

All of this to say that I am almost exactly where I was last year when faced with the reality of going into week 5 without paint on the walls.  My right arm has once again fallen off from fatigue and landed somewhere in Australia. Which means nothing gets installed until paint is dry.  Which really means I have no idea if my vision is any good in reality. What if I hate the paint? Hence that inevitable moment of self-doubt - that creative process of a hamster wheel that runs the gamut of euphoric best idea ever, humbling self-doubt, down to the crippling realization of minimal progress, intoxicating hope of survival, and back up to euphoric amazingness of concept realized.  Let’s hope I can claw my hamster butt up from feeling that my efforts have been futile through hopes of survival and back to euphoric amazingness.

Because current reality looks a lot like this:

Finish sanding walls to glossy smoothness

Prime ceiling and walls

Paint ceiling

Paint walls and trim

Paint beadboard

Install overhead light

Install sconces

Install towel rod

Install shower rod

Install faucet

Finish trim on curtain

Hang art

Accessorize

Shoot room

Shiver me patchy freakin timbers.

But I cannot leave you in an esoteric pit of despair.  On the upside, I received my JennyAndrews-Anderson painting and it is simply brilliance in art form.  A true artist.  And at 3pm today, brass sexiness arrived at my door in the form of my faucet which I ordered only 2 days ago.  Bam.  Love me some Amazon Prime.

By next week, I will have rushed to get a finished product to show you on time.  It is my hope that in the end, all of my insignificant-seeming little patch dots add up to something quite extraordinary. While I am hoping for a glamorous loo worthy of Mame Dennis or, to put a finer point on it, a masterpiece of a bathroom, I will be exceedingly satisfied that I have given this room my whole heart.  I will charge ahead inspired with a breath-of -life vitality for having produced another creation from start to finish.

Now, speaking of inspiration, go check out the other linking participants. And speaking of art in life, check out the final reveals of the 20 ORC participants next Wednesday.  True artistry indeed.

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Be sure to tune in next Thursday for my cliff-hanger…

All designs, layouts, and photos by Emily Vanderputten unless otherwise noted

kisses,  mrs. V